But is it possible to conceive a _real, subjective potentiality_ which _does not reside in anything actual_?(125) Now if the real essence is really distinct from its existence it must be conceived as a _real, subjective potentiality_ of existence. Yet it cannot be conceived as a potentiality _in_ anything actual: except indeed in the actually existing essence which is the composite result of its union with the existential act. It is not a real, subjective potentiality antecedently to the existential act, and on which the latter is, as it were, superimposed:(126) in itself, it is, in fact, nothing real except as actualized by the latter; but, as we have already observed, the process of actualization, whether by direct creation or by the action of created causes, must be conceived as having for its total term or effect a composite reality resulting from what we can at best imperfectly describe as the union of two correlative, con-created, or co-produced principles of being, a potential and an actual, really distinct from each other: that whereby the thing _can_ exist, the potentiality of existence, the essence; and that whereby the thing _does_ exist, the actuality of essence, the existence. The description is imperfect because these principles are not con-created or co-produced separately; but, rather, the creation or production of an existing essence, the efficiency by which it is “placed outside its causes,” has one single, though composite, term: the actually existing thing.